One of the great British filmmakers who are currently working (Peter Watkins and Michael Winterbottom are two others), Ken Loach achieved his masterpiece, perhaps, with 2001’s The Navigators,* a typically socially and politically committed film essaying the disastrous consequences of Prime Minister John Major’s Thatcheritic privatization of the British railway industry. On a roll, the […]
Daily Archives: May 27, 2007
You will find below an entry that had been included in the list of the 100 greatest films from the Soviet Union, Russia, Ukraine and Eastern Europe, which you will find elsewhere on this site. However, today I added another entry to that list (Béla Tarr’s The Prefab People), which required subtracting something. I chose […]
Just as no one can seriously dispute that Orson Welles is the greatest U.S.-born filmmaker, no one can seriously dispute that Yasujiro Ozu is the greatest Japanese filmmaker, whatever the glories that Kon Ichikawa, Shohei Imamura, Akira Kurosawa, Kenji Mizoguchi, Nagisa Oshima, Tomotaka Tasaka and others have contributed to world cinema. Indeed, Ozu is the […]
Adapting Toyoko Yamazaki’s novel, Shinobu Hashimoto contributes a brilliant screenplay for Shiroi Kyotou, perhaps cinema’s finest medical drama. It opens with a pancreatic cancer operation and reaches a climax with the patient’s autopsy after his widow sues surgeon Goro Zaizen for malpractice. Goro’s misdiagnosis of subsequent symptoms, resulting in the spread of cancer cells, is […]
Dennis Grunes 